Lendingkart Raises $30 Mn in Funding from Fullerton, Bertelsmann India and India Quotient

Financial technology firm Lendingkart Technologies on Friday said it has raised a fresh equity funding of ₹212 crore (US $30 million) led by existing investors, including Fullerton Financial Holdings Pte Ltd (FFH), Bertelsmann India Investments and India Quotient.

With this funding round, the total equity raised by Lendingkart stands at USD 143 million, a statement said. In June, Lendingkart marked one of the largest startup venture debt transactions in India when it raised ₹ 80 crore from Alteria Capital, a Mumbai-based Venture Debt fund.

"The funding will be used to expand lending bases, deepen Lendingkart Group's reach to small and underserved micro enterprises and further strengthen its technological and analytics capabilities," it added.

Credit Suisse acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Lendingkart Technologies.

"This equity will help us meet the growth opportunities we are seeing. Micro and small businesses represent a vibrant yet underserved segment of the Indian economy," Lendingkart Technologies co-founder and Managing Director Harshvardhan Lunia said.

Lendingkart Finance, the NBFC arm of Lendingkart Group, has disbursed over 60,000 loans to more than 55,000 MSMEs in 1,300 cities. PTI SR

CreditVidya Partners with Fullerton India to Offer Data-Based Authentication and Verification Services

Financial technology startup CreditVidya has partnered with Fullerton India to offer alternative data-based authentication and verification services, which will significantly improve the efficiency of loan processing.

Commenting on the announcement, Anand Natarajan, Head - Strategy & Business Execution, Fullerton India said, “An increasingly digitalized ecosystem is transforming the way a consumer conducts his financial and non-financial transactions, and interacts with the environment. Evolving demography and consumer needs require us, as responsible lenders, to adapt our own processes to incorporate the changing landscape in our validation processes and to reduce transaction friction. To this end, we have leveraged CreditVidya’s expertise in alternate data analytics to comprehensively digitize the customer validation processes. This has allowed us to eliminate physical intervention, thereby improving efficiency and turnaround time, delivering a markedly better customer experience.”

CreditVidya’s E-mail Fraud Application Programming Interface (API) uses approximately 80 email-related inferences to confirm employment details and analyse risks associated with potential borrowers. The platform runs automated assessments of the details submitted, and confirms the legitimacy of the applications, by combining data from eight discrete sources. This will help improve Fullerton’s India’s customer experience by eliminating manual verifications. Any inconsistency in the data is highlighted through a customized rule engine, allowing the lender to safely process more loan applications at a far lower cost.

Field Investigation (FI) Digital is another powerful alternative data-based tool that will enable Fullerton India to determine the veracity of the details submitted by an applicant. Traditionally, lenders use field verification checks to establish the ease of contacting a prospective borrower. This leads to a delay of several days in loan disbursal, until the report from the field agent is processed. CreditVidya’s technology eliminates this manual effort and consequently, the loan can be disbursed on the same day itself. Its Artificial Intelligence-based profiling algorithm verifies the details submitted in the loan application, including but not limited to, names, date(s) of birth and addresses, using various transactional and behavioural data. The Stability Score thus generated, allows Fullerton to fast track the application process, substantially reducing the time and cost of underwriting.

Commenting on the announcement, Abhishek Agarwal, Co-Founder and CEO, CreditVidya said, “Our vast expertise in alternate data - based analytics has allowed us to build products that instantly verify customers and detect fraud with a high degree of accuracy. This, in turn, increases operational efficiencies and reduces the turnaround time for a lender. We are thrilled to partner with Fullerton India, who truly believe in the power of technology to enhance the loan application process. We look forward to helping them continuously increase their efficiency and profitability and improving the experience for their customers.”

The Email Fraud API and FI Digital are a part of the ‘CreditVidya Grid’, a suite of tools that harness the power of big data and machine learning algorithms to verify loan applicant details instantly and accurately, to minimize exposure to fraud, so that the lenders can safely accept more customers.

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